Cosmic Apprentice

Dispatches from the Edges of Science

Dorion Sagan

Publication Year: 2013

In the pursuit of knowledge, Dorion Sagan argues in this dazzlingly eclectic, rigorously crafted, and deliciously witty collection of essays, scientific authoritarianism and philosophical obscurantism are equally formidable obstacles to discovery. As science has become more specialized and more costly, its questing spirit has been constrained by dogma. And philosophy, perhaps the discipline best placed to question orthodoxy, has retreated behind dense theoretical language and arcane topics of learning.

Guided by a capacious, democratic view of science inspired by the examples set by his late parents—Carl Sagan, who popularized the study of the cosmos, and Lynn Margulis, an evolutionary biologist who repeatedly clashed with the scientific establishment—Sagan draws on classical and contemporary philosophy to intervene provocatively in often-charged debates on thermodynamics, linear and nonlinear time, purpose, ethics, the links between language and psychedelic drugs, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and the occupation of the human body by microbial others. Informed by a countercultural sensibility, a deep engagement with speculative thought, and a hardheaded scientific skepticism, he advances controversial positions on such seemingly sacrosanct subjects as evolution and entropy. At the same time, he creatively considers a wide range of thinkers, from Socrates to Bataille and Descartes to von Uexküll, to reflect on sex, biopolitics, and the free will of Kermit the Frog.

Refreshingly nonconformist and polemically incisive, Cosmic Apprentice challenges readers to reject both dogma and cliché and instead recover the intellectual spirit of adventure that should—and can once again—animate both science and philosophy.

Title Page, Copyright, Dedication

Contents

Introduction: Condensed - The Questing Spirit

Recognizing itself in the aqua facade of a planet cloud swirled and surrounded
by the immensity of space, living matter is a message with no
discrete meaning. Its message is more the possibility of meaning. Cycling
its matter, life is open to its surroundings. It spreads into them, extending...

Part I: From "Protozoan" To Posthuman

Chapter 1: The Human Is More Than Human: Interspecies Communities and the New Facts of Life

“This universe,” says the physicist Richard Feynman, “just goes on, with
its edge as unknown as the bottom of the bottomless sea . . . just as mysterious,
just as awe-inspiring, and just as incomplete as the poetic pictures
that came before. But see that the imagination of nature is far, far...

Chapter 2: Bataille's Sun And The Ethical Abyss: Late-Night Thoughts on the Problem of an Affirmative Biopolitics

Today is the first day of the rest of your strife. In thinking about ethics
we come up against some of the most difficult problems. One person’s
righteous indignation is another’s reactionary oppression. The citizen’s
free speech can be the government’s hate speech. The model’s...

Chapter 3: The Post-Man Already Always Rings Twice

The first ringing is literal and refers to what comes after humans
in evolution. The first ringing announcement that the posthuman has
arrived has to do with speciation, guesswork, machines; with loose predictions
that fall off a cliff of accuracy as we extrapolate physically nonextrapolatable...

Part II: Stardust Memories

Chapter 4: Stardust Memories

Quantitatively, dust refers to solid particles with diameters of less than
500 micrometers. A micrometer, also known as a micron, is a millionth
of a meter, or 0.000039 of an inch. The eye of a needle is 750 microns
wide, enough to get some camel dust through. The diameter of the period...

Chapter 5: A Quick History Of Sex

In his Letters to His Son on the Art of Becoming a Man of the World and a
Gentleman, Lord Chesterfield, the eighteenth-century British statesman
and man of letters, offered the following concise account of sex: “The expense
is damnable, the pleasure momentary and the position ludicrous.”...

Chapter 6: Who Is I?

You see, after I described some of my political views, mentioning the
strange question of the status of the Federal Reserve as a private corporation,
as well as some of the scientific anomalies surrounding the events
of 9/11, I was told that my views pretty much matched those of members...

Chapter 7: Of Whales And Aliens: The Search for Intelligent Life on Earth

Half my little life ago, under the influence of P. cubensis—aka psychedelic
mushrooms—I, and two of my reprobate friends, found ourselves
among a sea of tourists in Quincy Market. After overhearing a mini
Sopranos-style imbiber declaiming loudly upon the niceties of female...

Part III: Gaia Sings The Blues

Thermodynamics started off bright enough, practical and blond, saving
the world from its limits. But then, overcome by shadows, its shiny
children got dirt in their fingernails, soot in their hair; the world darkened
with a foreboding of smokestacks. To the injury of overpopulation...

Chapter 9: Life Gave Earth The Blues

Nature is not just red in tooth and claw but green with symbiotic
chloroplasts, yellow with chrysophyte algae, and flamingo-pink with ingested
carotenoids. It is an amazing psychedelic display of spiraling foraminifera,
radiating radiolaria, and diatomaceous earth-making diatoms....

Chapter 10: Mousetrap

I believe the writer Kurt Vonnegut touched on the heart of this question.
Before a full house of mostly women at Smith College, he first
drew a chart that graphed stories. On the X axis he drew time, on the
Y happiness. By making a line, he showed, he could map any human...

Chapter 11: Priests Of The Modern Age: Scientific Revolutions and the Kook-Critic Continuum, Being a Play of Crackpots, Skeptics, Conformists, and the Curious

“Scientists are the priests of the modern age, and they must be watched
very closely,” wrote Samuel Butler at the end of the nineteenth century.
Butler had converted to an evolutionary view after he read Charles Darwin’s
Origin of Species. Since Butler had freed himself, with great difficulty...

Chapter 12: Metametazoa

Like a gray geode cracked open to reveal coruscating crystals of amethyst,
the history of science sometimes surprises. Empedocles imagined
an ancient world of organs mating and merging with one another to
create bizarre half-hewn beasts, the most favorable matches surviving....

Chapter 13: Kermitronics

Like the mime in a circus who pretends, from the dirty floor, to balance
the high-wire walker, or the clown who, twirling her fingers with a gleeful
simper, seems to send the acrobats falling head over heels in their
aerial somersaults, before reaching through thin air to catch a helping...

Chapter 14: On Doyle On Drugs

I grew up in Timothy Leary’s old neighborhood. Newton Center in the
mid-1970s was past the glory days of Orange Sunshine, but a few kids
knew about it. We did all right though, with our Blotter, Microdot, and
Windowpane, which catapulted me, one fine afternoon, after a whole hit...

Conclusion: Floating Into Spinoza's Ocean

G. Evelyn Hutchinson, considered the single most important author to
understand the fundaments of modern ecology, emphasized that a scientific
theory’s primary value was not its usefulness but its ability to
produce a form of enlightenment, similar to a great work of art.1 And...

Welcome to Project MUSE

Use the simple Search box at the top of the page or the Advanced Search linked from the top of the page to find book and journal content. Refine results with the filtering options on the left side of the Advanced Search page or on your search results page. Click the Browse box to see a selection of books and journals by: Research Area, Titles A-Z, Publisher, Books only, or Journals only.